1.8.2-Pilferingapples
Brick!Club Les Miserables 1.8.2 Fantine Happy Any time Fantine’s name is mentioned in any proximity to happiness, it’s the signal for everything to rocketsled to disaster faster than should be possible without the application of actual rocket fuel. I do not trust this chapter, is what I mean. Willing to cut Fantine a lot of slack for any rambling here, since she’s highly feverish and near death and all. I am always rather put out by people describing her character here as weak or not lucid; she’s really holding together very well for someone in Superfever Death Mode. She’s still working off real information and current environmental cues— the lies Madeleine has told her, the laughter of the child outside. She might not be entirely connecting the dots anymore, but she remembers where the dots WERE. And, gotta say, this is a pretty accurate reflection of a certain sort of person in the middle of serious fever times; get nicer! SUPER NICE! Someone give this woman a hug before it’s too late. Whoops, its too late now! The Happy doesn’t even last to the end of the chapter. Fantine doesn’t even get to keep her Symbolic Disease End Stage Beauty, because something terrible has appeared. MUST BE JAVERT, he’s the only direct antagonist! Really, I sort of wonder what Valjean was trying to accomplish, coming back here. Fantine already thought he was gone to fetch Cosette; even if he didn’t know that on the way into the sick room, Simplice totally stopped him to tell him so! If he’d just turned around to get Cosette at that point, perhaps it would have spared him some grief? I am honestly not sure. But it wouldn’t have upset Fantine anymore than what actually happens. Tomorrow: WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENS NO NO NO NO. Commentary Gascon-en-exile I’m currently having a minor case of writer’s block in the middle of the second half of the Sherlock Holmes post, so either taking a break for Brick Club will jar me out of it or make me even more unable to write. Oh, well, here goes nothing. It almost is nothing too, because I don’t feel I’ve much productive to add for this chapter. At most I can’t help but remark on how Fantine, almost from the first time we see her after Tholomyès dumps her, develops a habit of latching onto others to the point of idealization and obsession. Cosette is always her impossible goal and her own private heaven, but she also spends long paragraphs praising first Mme. Thénardier, then Javert, then Valjean. She similarly goes to great lengths to vilify Valjean before he saves her from Javert, and of course Javert’s appearance here at her deathbed is symbolically terrifying enough to kill her outright. It serves to emphasize just how alone and necessarily trusting of people Fantine is, because even when she was with Tholomyès she was in a vulnerable and socially isolated position and, to reference another work I’ll probably be writing on soon, has “always depended upon the kindness of strangers.” Her painting in broad strokes also play into Hugo’s love of symbolic characterization, but that’s just a bonus. Kalevala-sage My first response to “''elle était la joie même''" was to coyly climb my pretentious-ladder and suggest some irony in the chapter title as "Fantine heureuse" could easily have been "Fantine est heureuse,” i.e. Fantine is happy and she is happiness itself…but the English construction is identical, so I suppose I can’t. *pouts* Instead, I’m inclined to dwell on Valjean’s peculiarly forgotten line, as not only does Valjean ruminate extensively on even his unintentional wrongs (Petit-Gervais, most notably), but he also seems to have adopted a singular deliberation that perhaps springs from his Catholic ideology and the free will there entailed (“''après tout il tenait sa destinée, si mauvaise qu’elle voulût être, dans sa main…il en était le maître''" is a quote to that overarching argument from that enormous segment I, uh, skipped, even more than everyone else—though Valjean is at the time wrestling with these ideas and at one point reconciles fate with free will in rationalizing that "Ce n’était plus sa faute, c’était, non le fait de sa conscience, mais le fait de la providence," so he’s hardly conclusive about the matter). Or rather—if I’m to express that without an unfastidiously long parenthetical—he tends to take his actions rather seriously, and even if he does have fits of wantonness, he’s certainly still uninclined toward forgetfulness. This worries me even more so than Fantine’s predicament, as having her health on the line in the background only ups the moral ante of his words: after this thoroughly confessional journey, does he tarnish his newly rasa tabula and lie to placate her; or does he let the truth slip and trigger her later excitement?